Posts Categorised: Social Media Traffic

Do you enjoy scrap-booking? Or may be…you enjoy push-pinning your fav images clipped from magazines, to cork boards.

Now you can do that digitally!

This service comes from a new website called Pinterest.com and it’s FREE.

Feel like to celebrate? Then celebrate it! I already had my celebrations. 🙂

May be your spouse has mentioned it to you already, or may be a social friend did! If you are a woman, most likely you know about it. But if you don’t know everything about this site, this article will be of interest to you.

Looks like to me that this digital bulletin board has come to stay for a long time, because, next to Facebook and twitter, this site is the latest social media craze. Some are enjoying it already, some have just joined, some are starting to get the buzz and some are yet to listen about it.

What Can You Do With Pinterest?

You can collect, capture your fav images from all over the net and pin those to one big personal digital board. Even your friends can pin their images to your board and you on theirs. Somebody who loves those images can ‘Like’ it in a similar way as done in Facebook or ‘Repin’ it to another board. That makes it viral, isn’t that?

You no longer need to bookmark the site url, instead you pin it on Pinterest and it’s saved for you there. You have to go and get it there any time you want.

You can do it with the click of a button; even you can add that button to your browser!

Is that all?

Certainly not!

There is more to it.

When somebody click on the image, it takes him/her to the source. It gives a lot of traffic to the site who originally posted the image. Win-win for the site and you.

People make a lot of money with that. You have to figure that out yourself. 🙂

So, the eCommerce sites, internet and affiliate marketers are excited by Pinterest too. They’ve found that Pinterest has the potential to drive as much traffic to their sites as the web2.0 and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

A little bit of history isn’t bad!

Ben Silbermann and some of his friends conceived this idea on Thanksgiving day, 2009 and Pinterest was launched in private beta in March 2010. Ben is a Yale graduate and former Googler.

The words of mouth spread very fast and Pinterest reached the millionth unique visitor by July 2011. This site was initially popular mostly among women, may be the name is bit ‘girly’ and appeals to women. They say Ben’s wife came up with this unique name!

Check the following screen shots to know the amount of traffic they are attracting as on now.

Following two screen shot I have taken from alexa.com.

The future trend

Does the future augur well for Pinterest?

Maybe or maybe not!

Presently, every Pinterest user, on an average, spends approximately 90 to 100 minutes per day(I am not sure of this data, it may change) on the site. If these trends are any indication, this is going to increase very fast in the near future.

There is another voice in the air – skepticism. That may be right too.

Firstly, it is too early to say anything, because people are anything but predictable. Who knows what other sites are going to come up in the very next moment. If people find something more interesting and more profitable, they are surely going to shift their attention.

Secondly, Pinterest is not making any remarkable revenue now. Though they have solid finance, who knows how long they will last.

Thirdly, there may be a copyright issue.

The users, presently, post photos without proper permission from the owners. Though, Pinterest duly credits the site by linking to the original source, that doesn’t fulfill the copyright T&C. As per the fair use doctrine, thumbnails are permitted, but Pinterest imports the full-size image. This may seem to be OK at present, but as the popularity and revenue potential of this site grows this may be a sore point with many.

The search engines more or less do the same thing, but they transfer the traffic elsewhere. Pinterest may use the same argument to protect its interests in case of legal issues coming up, but it is for the best legal brains to say what is correct.

How to use Pinterest

In a nutshell, this is a “Visual Image Bookmarking Social Media Site.”

It is free to use. You can join the site by invitation only. At least, at present it is so. After you request the invite, you will receive the invite to sign up. You can sign up either by creating your own user name and password or via Twitter or Facebook also. This may be a marketing strategy or a mechanism to exercise some amount of control over the growth of the site.

Then you choose your category and follow people.

You can ‘Pin’ an image/video from your computer

You can ‘Pin’ an image/video from any website

You can ‘Repin’ a friend’s image/video

You can ‘Like’ a friend’s image/video

You can do all these to your own board or to any other public board

You can put your comment to all of the above

It is a detailed process. Though it is not very complicated, it takes time to figure out all the details.

If you are interested in making commercial use of this site, you can get some training. There are some good video training available for less than 4 bucks. You can check it here.

I think, I know where will you go from here. A last word, don’t forget to follow me when you get your membership. 🙂

P.S.

Be careful and don’t get scammed.

As on now, I have found two scam sites ranking in Google 1st page for a very important keyword.

The first site is using Pinterest logo also. They are promising a free membership and asking youU to take a survey to prove that you are not a bot.

The second site is charging $ 0.99 through Paypal to give you an immediate membership. 😉

I don’t want to give the name of these sites or the keywords as there will be a lot of search and these sites will benefit from that. I am planning to make a video shortly on that.